


Oh Brother, Had You Known Our Mighty Hall

by SylvanWitch



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Apocafic, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 13:29:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Where once they’d gathered around a table and looked out upon their city, now were only the jutting ruins of broken beams, exposing all to the star-blank sky.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh Brother, Had You Known Our Mighty Hall

**Author's Note:**

> This is what comes of reading _Avengers_ fic by night and Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_ each morning. Things didn't end well for that Round Table, either.

Where once they’d gathered around a table and looked out upon their city, now were only the jutting ruins of broken beams, exposing all to the star-blank sky.

 

Still he came, despite the reminder of what had been, and in his mind’s eye he saw not the annihilation of disaster and slow time but the shining faces and laughing mouths, the hands grasping shoulders or passing cups, the laden table full more of life and hope and their joy in living than with the abundance that had always been provided them.

 

He came despite the cold in his bones and the way his joints creaked as he climbed to an insecure perch.

 

He came despite the cramping despair that left him breathless, throat-clogged and clinging to his place among the rubble.

 

He came despite that none other had ever joined him in his solitary vigil, here among the ruins, the only memorial for giants who would never stride the earth again with thundering step.

 

Until that night, the final night, when his gasping ascent marked the last passage he would make of the climb, when one too like him met him in the place where they’d first laid hand to heart and promised forever, a foolish vow, he knew now, beholding all that had been and no longer was.

 

“I didn’t think you were still—,” he started, voice rusty from disuse.  The world below was cloaked in silence and death, and he had little cause to speak in his futile wanderings.

 

“I am,” the other said, simply, closing his eyes against the effort it had taken him to find his own way to the top of the tower.

 

“Where?” was his only answer, and if in it was infinite loneliness, the other was kind enough to ignore it.

 

“Here and there.”  

 

It was maddening, this not-answer, but what little energy he had for outrage was all spent on considering how Phil had changed, how his hands, once deft of expression, were knotted and scarred, how his face, once lined from smiling, was now drawn by anguish and the constant vigilance required of any who hadn’t had the sense yet to die.

 

“Why didn’t you ever—?” he started, remembering only belatedly that he’d once been the kind of man who never asked for anything.

 

Phil’s shrug, though clothed in battered denim, was eloquent as always, and a corner of his mouth quirked up in a too-familiar way, stealing Clint’s breath with regret for not having kissed it all those years ago when they’d still been whole and healthy and as happy as any could be with the weight they’d carried in those days.

 

“I couldn’t,” he said simply, then, as if conceding that Clint deserved a real answer, though Clint had read enough in Phil’s posture and the manner in which his hands clenched and unclenched, petals withering and opening, withering and opening.

 

So much death.

 

Clint nodded, clenched his jaw, feeling the ache of regret to his bones, and then beckoned toward what had once been their communal table.  Now, blocks of concrete, the remains of one outer wall, served as seats, and a charred space in the center of the ragged circle showed the place where Clint had had his lonely vigil fires for so many, many years.

 

“Risky,” Phil observed, nodding toward the exposed skyline, the way the fire would act as beacon in the stygian, eternal night.  Nothing called up out of that darkness would welcome Clint’s return to the tower.

 

It was Clint’s turn to shrug, one-shouldered and painful—only his drawing arm remained fully mobile, and it took every ounce of his once considerable strength even to hold a bow these days.   The gesture said more clearly than words his reason for lighting up the sky once a year in this place.

 

“He always loved the view,” Phil observed bravely, then, throwing the words as if a gauntlet where Clint knelt to start a fire.

 

Clint nodded, feeling his way toward the memory of Tony Stark standing on his balcony, legs spread, arms wide, as if by that gesture alone he could claim ownership of all the world—ownership and the right to love and protect it.

 

Tony’s the easiest to remember, his fate having been the least painful, the most beautiful:  the suit lighting up in the last rays of the setting sun like a supernova, an elegant, arcing dive into the sea, sparking the waves alight with pink and orange as his vital signs winked out on the last working monitor and his farewell words caressed their straining ears.

 

“Bruce didn’t,” Clint said a long while later but as if continuing a conversation they’d been having all along.

 

The height of the tower and breadth of the horizon had reminded Bruce, Clint thought, of all that he had given away.  Too, because the other guy was so large, Bruce had clung to enclosed spaces, as if by forcing himself into the box of a laboratory or the cage of a windowless apartment he could prevent himself from giving in to the green fire sparked by his jealousy of a life—his own life—that he’d lost.

 

Ironic, then, that it hadn’t been in his other self that Bruce had been lost to all of them.

 

Clint tried to let the memory go, not wanting to hear Bruce’s strained cry over the comms, the way he’d wheezed against the constriction of the change, prevented from full transformation by a toxin all but he had been immune to.  Tried to close his eyes against the image of Bruce’s features contorting in agony as his body bucked to break free and grow, as his skin mottled a sickly green and his brow expanded around desperate eyes that pleaded—pleaded, skyward, honing in on Clint’s perch, begging for the ultimate freedom Clint’s perfect aim promised.

 

“You did the right thing,” Phil said then, drawing Clint back from the dangerous edge of remembrance.  “He was dying.”

 

So they’d all said, Steve with his hand on Clint’s shoulder, a phantom pressure even now and the last time Cap had touched him carefully, guarding against the crushing strength that would have reduced Clint’s shoulder to shrapnel.  Soon after, Cap hadn’t had even the strength of a bird’s wing fluttering uselessly against the tempest.

 

Phil’s face across the fire was painted in sorrow, the deep shadows beneath his eyes hiding an expression Clint knew too well from his own face in the shattered fragments of the mirrors Tony had hung in every bathroom.  The ghost of Tony’s voice, saying something about wanting to look their best for the world, haunted the air around Clint’s ears, and he shook it away, watching a memory crawl across Phil’s shadowed face.

 

Captain America had not died well, though he’d been courageous to the last, battling against the disease that bored through him like an augur, trailing ugliness through every vein, poisoning his cells.  None had imagined a pathogen could disarm the great hero, but when the second wave of plague had spread throughout their city, he’d gone out fearlessly to meet it, a legend bearing strength and fortitude as his shield, and discovered an insidious infection intended to destroy him.

 

It had been the worst side effect that the virus had also decimated millions.

 

In his last anguish Steve had neither begged nor bargained, a spent and withered shell against the sheets of his bed, which dwarfed him now, shrunken as he was by the wasting disease.

 

“Hold the line,” he’d whispered to Phil, who’d held his hero’s hand with a gentleness that had already been driven out of the rest of them.  “Hold the line,” he’d said a second time, and that was the last word from the first Avenger.

 

But they hadn’t held.  There’d been precious little left at that point, only pockets of resistance against the great evil that had risen in the East, an evil intended to annihilate the world’s good in order to make of it an empire of darkness.

 

Of course, Natasha had disordered all Their careful plans, her last sacrifice the greatest.

 

The Black Widow had crept among Their numbers unseen, unsuspected, had worked her way to the foot of the throne, naked and chained, groveling—or so He’d thought who’d had her brought to him, a mastering hand fisted in her ruby hair.

 

“My pet,” He’d called her, unctuous and self-assured, and she’d licked the space of skin above his boot, striping his calf with a neurotoxin that brought him down even as it constricted in her throat, left her writhing in a puddle of her own mess as she choked out her last words around a reaper’s grin:  “Not yours.”

 

The gathered last forces of resistance had watched it on the big screen in Times Square, where they’d been herded to see their ultimate subjugation before being gassed en masse.

 

But His death had left a vacuum, caused a vortex that swept the ranks of the amassed armies of evil, broke over them in a wave of chaos and left behind nothing but scorched earth and the straggling remains of a once strong species.

 

Earth wasn’t even worth picking over.  Now and again in the years since the fall, lights had come to the sky, hovered as if considering what man had made of man, and then departed, not deeming anything worthy of claiming.

 

Clint had often watched them from some height or other and wondered if any could have carried a message to his shield-brother, to Thor, who’d left the tower in a blaze of vertiginous lightning, lightning that had been trapped against a sky the color of an old bruise, and whose thunderous voice had come back to them, reedy and broken, as he’d been sucked away to some end that none of them could know or help.

 

Clint didn’t like to think of Thor, but he heard that cry in his nightmares, from which he’d wake to a world no better than that which he had walked in his dreams.

 

A movement across the fire drew Clint’s eyes to Phil, who had stood and moved toward Clint and was holding out a hand.

 

Clint knew an invitation, though it had been decades since he’d taken any comfort in the heat of another’s touch.  Only cold rain and ash had caressed him since he’d slunk away from the Square, Natasha’s twisted rictus of a grin filling all of his vision with her lost loveliness.  He had thought he was the last of them.

 

Now, an impossible boon offered, Clint hesitated, considering the hand.

 

“I’m not coming down from here,” he said at last, wanting at least to be honest, now when it didn’t matter anymore, when truth and lies meant nothing.

 

“I know,” Phil answered.  “I know.”  He crooked his fingers in welcome, the only impatience he’d ever betray, and something warm bloomed behind Clint’s breastbone.

 

For the first time in an eternity of numbing grief, Clint felt a stirring in his belly, an appetite awoken that he’d all but forgotten in his solitary quest for something he’d never been able to name but had always believed was glimmering just beyond the reach of even his, the keenest of sight.

 

Clint took Phil’s hand, let himself be led to a nest of rags and dust behind what had once been a kitchen island.  The tile was cracked, pulverized to gravel in places, and it ground like bone beneath his feet.

 

They undressed in silence, only their rasping, dust-choked breath to break the uneasy quiet, and when they were naked, their bodies betrayed the toil of their lives, a mass of scars at Phil’s shoulder like a nest of silver spiders, a puckered red mound where infection had eaten at Clint’s thigh, and everywhere the map of their lone wanderings, the key in hieroglyphics to every awful thing they’d seen and suffered.

 

With a solemnity that was almost reverence, Phil traced his fingertips down Clint’s flank, numbering his ribs, raising a shudder in him and bringing a moan to the back of his throat that escaped him in a sound, unashamed and naked need released at last on the waiting air.

 

Likewise, he touched Phil with a certain wonder, the unexpected gift of flesh and bone, the unlooked for, eleventh hour miracle of reawakened desire making his hands hurry where they would be slow, driving him on toward something huge and impossible that he knew would annihilate him finally and for all.

 

Phil wrapped his hand at last around Clint’s hard shaft, stroking dry and firm, easing from Clint a restless whine.  Following Phil’s lead, Clint took Phil in hand, shivering again for the hot, silken weight against his palm and the trust laid bare in Phil’s lean face.  

 

“Let me,” said Phil then, removing his hand only to bracket Clint’s shoulders and urge him to lay down, feeling the broken tile beneath the mess of rags, feeling the press of Phil’s weight between his thighs as Phil covered him, followed the line of his throat with tongue and teeth, mouthing at his nipples, laving fire down his belly and ghosting his nose through the trail of hair to his root.  Phil wrapped Clint in fire, molten and obliterating, and Clint gave a strangled shout and came and came and came, too long since he’d last been touched or even touched himself, too impossibly good to hold out against.

 

Phil came up with a smile and spent the last of Clint’s seed into his own mouth, the only meal they’d shared, and with the taste of his waning life on his tongue, Clint kissed back, his mouth slack from completion but hungry, still hungry, surging up to grasp Phil’s nape, to bring Phil’s mouth closer and yet closer, as if he’d have Phil climb inside him.

 

With his other hand, Clint stroked Phil’s length even as he swallowed his groans of need, rubbed a rough palm over the slick head of his cock, and held Phil as he shuddered out his release against Clint’s heaving belly.

 

When Phil at last levered himself up on shaking arms to look down into Clint’s eyes, Clint saw in Phil’s face an echoed resolve, saw that he, too, had come to the tower to lay himself to rest on its shattered peak, to stand once more beside the broken table where they’d made their plans and pacts, where they’d laughed and loved one another and promised forever against a future they’d never believed would fail them until it had.

 

So they rose at last, naked, and made their way to the dying fire, its embers casting weird shadows, little mockeries of life, against the broken stone that had once been their home, and they sat down side by side, shoulder to shoulder, letting the cold seep into their bones, frozen now as the seeds of flame wisp out, tendrils of invisible smoke the only offering to an unfeeling sky.

 

If any were left to remember them in later days, they’d see them there, upright in the ruins, and wonder to themselves what warriors these, who’d never surrendered except and at last to the inevitable end. 


End file.
